The Sultan's Descent

Very few people are aware that the actual sultan of Turkey is descended from a Frenen lady. His great-grandmother, Nachasadil Sultana, consort of Abdul Hamid I, was bom in the West Indian Island of Martinique in the latter quarter of the eighteenth oentury. Her maiden name was Aimee Dubuc de Rivery. She was cousin and companion in childhood of another lady, Josephine de la Pagerie, who escaped from the guillotine on which her first husband was beheaded, to become Empress of the French. Mlle. de Rivery, on the completion of her education at a convent in Nantes, embarked at Marseilles for the West Indies. She was shipwrecked and rescued by a vessel on its way to Algiers. This vessel was captured by Algerian pirates, and the lady was taken prisoner, and sold as a slave to the Bey, who in his turn made her a present to Abdul Hamid I. By him she became the mother of Mahomoud II, the Reformer, and grandfather of the present sultan. In 1869 the Sultan Abdul Aziz gave the details of the story to Empress Eugenie, then in Constantinople on her way to Cairo, and very gracefully claimed her as a cousin.